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CHAPTER 2 PARADIGMS, THEORY, AND RESEARCH

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1. CHAPTER 2 PARADIGMS, THEORY, AND RESEARCH

2. Chapter Outline Some Social Science Paradigms
Two Logical Systems Revisited
Deductive Theory Construction
Inductive Theory Construction
The Links between Theory and Research
The Importance of Theory in the “Real World”
Research Ethics and Theory
Quick Quiz

3. Paradigms – A model or frames of reference through which to observe and understand.
“Patterns happen.”
Logical explanations are what theories seek to provide.
Theories prevent our being taken in by flukes.
Theories makes sense of observed patterns.
Theories shape and direct research efforts.

4. Some Social Science Paradigms When we recognize that we are operating within a paradigm, two benefits accrue.
We can better understand seemingly bizarre views and actions of others who are operating under different paradigms.
We can profit from stepping outside of our paradigm.

5. Paradigms play a fundamental role in science.
Paradigms are neither true nor false.

6. Macrotheory – A theory aimed at understanding the “big picture” of institutions, whole societies, and the interactions among societies.
Examples: class struggles, international relations, and interrelations between social institutions
Microtheory – A theory aimed at understanding social life on the intimate level of individuals and their interactions.
Examples: dating behavior, jury deliberations, student-faculty interactions

9. Conflict Paradigm
Marx: social behavior is best explained as the process of conflict – the attempt to dominate others and to avoid being dominated.
Simmel: focused on small-scale conflict.
Chossudovsky (1997): international and global competition.

10. Symbolic Interactionism
Simmel: interested in how individuals interacted with one another, a micro approach.
Mead: “taking the role of the other”
Cooley: “looking-glass self,” primary groups

11. Ethnomethodology
Garfinkel: people are continually creating social structure through their actions and interactions, creating their realities.
Ethnomethology – methodology of the people.

12. Structural Functionalism (Social Systems Theory)
A social entity can be viewed as an organism. A social system is made up of parts, each of which contributes to the functioning of the whole.

13. Feminist Paradigms
Feminists call attention to aspects of social life that other paradigms do not reveal.
Concerned with the treatment of women and the experience of oppression.

14. Feminist Standpoint Theory – Women have knowledge about their status and experience that is not available to men.

15. Critical Race Theory
W.E.B. DuBois: roots in the civil rights movement
African Americans lived their lives through a “dual consciousness”: as Americans and as Black people.
Bell (1980)
Interest Convergence – Majority group members will only support the interests of minorities when those actions also support the interests of the majority group.

16. Rational Objectivity
Comte: society can be studied rationally and objectively.
But can this be used to predict nonrational behavior?
A more sophisticated positivism would assert that we can rationally understand and predict even nonrational behavior. An example is the famous Asch experiment (Asch 1958). In this experiment, a group of subjects is presented with a set of lines on a screen and asked to identify the two lines that are equal in length.
Imagine yourself a subject in such an experiment. You are sitting in the front row of a classroom in a group of six subjects. A set of lines is projected on the wall in front of you (see Figure 2-1). The experimenter asks each of you, one at a time, to identify the line to the right (A, B, or C) that matches the length of line X. The correct answer (B) is pretty obvious to you. To your surprise, however, you ?nd that all the other subjects agree on a different answer!
[Insert figure 2-1 Here]
The experimenter announces that all but one of the group has gotten the correct answer. Because you are the only one who chose B, this amounts to saying that you’ve gotten it wrong. Then a new set of lines is presented, and you have the same experience. What seems to be the obviously correct answer is said by everyone else to be wrong.
As it turns out, of course, you are the only real subject in this experiment—all the others are working with the experimenter. The purpose of the experiment is to see whether you will be swayed by public pressure to go along with the incorrect answer. In his initial experiments, all of which involved young men, Asch found that a little over one-third of his subjects did just that.
Choosing an obviously wrong answer in a simple experiment is an example of nonrational behavior. But as Asch went on to show, experimenters can examine the circumstances that lead more or fewer subjects to go along with the incorrect answer. For example, in subsequent studies, Asch varied the size of one group and the number of “dissenters” who chose the “wrong” (that is, the correct) answer. Thus, it is possible to study nonrational behavior rationally and scienti?cally.
More radically, we can question whether social life abides by rational principles at all. In the physical sciences, developments such as chaos theory, fuzzy logic, and complexity have suggested that we may need to rethink fundamentally the orderliness of events in the physical world. Certainly the social world might be no tidier than the world of physics.
The contemporary challenge to positivism, however, goes beyond the question of whether people behave rationally. In part, the criticism of positivism challenges the idea that scientists can be as objective as the positivistic ideal assumes. Most scientists would agree that personal feelings can and do in?uence the problems scientists choose to study, what they choose to observe, and the conclusions they draw from their observations.
There is an even more radical critique of the ideal of objectivity. As we glimpsed in the discussions of feminism and ethnomethodology, some contemporary researchers suggest that subjectivity might actually be preferable in some situations. Let’s take a moment to return to the dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity.
To begin, all our experiences are inescapably subjective. There is no way out. We can see only through our own eyes, and anything peculiar to our eyes will shape what we see. We can hear things only the way our particular ears and brain transmit and interpret sound waves. You and I, to some extent, hear and see different realities. And both of us experience quite different physical “realities” than, say, do bats. In what to us is total darkness, a bat “sees” things such as ?ying insects by emitting a sound we humans can’t hear. The re?ection of the bat’s sound creates a “sound picture” precise enough for the bat to home in on the moving insect and snatch it up in its teeth. In a similar vein, scientists on the planet Xandu might develop theories of the physical world based on a sensory apparatus that we humans can’t even imagine. Maybe they see X-rays or hear colors.
Despite the inescapable subjectivity of our experience, we humans seem to be wired to seek an agreement on what is really real, what is objectively so. Objectivity is a conceptual attempt to get beyond our individual views. It is ultimately a matter of communication, as you and I attempt to ?nd a common ground in our subjective experiences. Whenever we succeed in our search, we say we are dealing with objective reality. This is the agreement reality discussed in Chapter 1.
To this point, perhaps the most signi?cant studies in the history of social science were conducted in the 1930s by a Turkish American social psychologist, Muzafer Sherif (1935), who slyly said he wanted to study “auto-kinetic effects.” To do this, he put small groups in totally darkened rooms, save for a single point of light in the center of the wall in front of the participants. Sherif explained that the light would soon begin to move about, and the subjects were to determine how far it was moving—a dif?cult task with nothing else visible as a gauge of length or distance.
Amazingly, each of the groups was able to agree as to the distance the point of light moved about. Oddly, however, the different groups of subjects arrived at very different conclusions. Strangest of all—as you may have guessed—the point of light had remained stationary. If you stare at a ?xed point of light long enough it will seem to move about (Sherif’s “auto-kinetic effect”). Notice, however, that each of the groups agreed on a speci?c delusion. The movement of the light was real to them, but it was a reality created out of nothing: a socially constructed reality.
Whereas our subjectivity is individual, then, our search for objectivity is social. This is true in all aspects of life, not just in science. While you and I prefer different foods, we must agree to some extent on what is ?t to eat and what is not, or else there could be no restaurants or grocery stores. The same argument could be made regarding every other form of consumption. Without agreement reality, there could be no movies or television, no sports.
Social scientists as well have found bene?ts in the concept of a socially agreed-on objective reality. As people seek to impose order on their experience of life, they ?nd it useful to pursue this goal as a collective venture. What are the causes and cures of prejudice? Working together, social researchers have uncovered some answers that hold up to intersubjective scrutiny. Whatever your subjective experience of things, for example, you can discover for yourself that as education increases, prejudice generally tends to decrease. Because each of us can discover this independently, we say that it is objectively true.
From the seventeenth century through the middle of the twentieth, however, the belief in an objective reality that was independent of individual perceptions predominated in science. For the most part, it was not simply held as a useful paradigm but as The Truth. The term positivism has generally represented the belief in a logically ordered, objective reality that we can come to know better and better through science. This is the view challenged today by postmodernists and others.
Some say that the ideal of objectivity conceals as much as it reveals. As we saw earlier, in years past much of what was regarded as objectivity in Western social science was actually an agreement primarily among white, middle-class European men. Equally real experiences common to women, to ethnic minorities, to non-Western cultures, or to the poor were not necessarily represented in that reality.
Thus, early anthropologists are now criticized for often making modern, Westernized “sense” out of the beliefs and practices of nonliterate tribes around the world, sometimes by portraying their subjects as superstitious savages. We often call orally transmitted beliefs about the distant past “creation myth,” whereas we speak of our own beliefs as “history.” Increasingly today, there is a demand to ?nd the native logic by which various peoples make sense out of life and to understand it on its own terms.
Ultimately, we’ll never be able to distinguish completely between an objective reality and our subjective experience. We can’t know whether our concepts correspond to an objective reality or are simply useful in allowing us to predict and control our environment. So desperate is our need to know what is really real, however, that both positivists and postmodernists are sometimes drawn into the belief that their own view is real and true. There is a dual irony in this. On the one hand, the positivist’s belief that science precisely mirrors the objective world must ultimately be based on faith; it cannot be proved by “objective” science, because that’s precisely what’s at issue. And the postmodernists, who say nothing is objectively so and everything is ultimately subjective, do at least feel that that is really the way things are.
Postmodernism is often portrayed as a denial of the possibility of social science. Because this book has already expressed sympathy for some postmodern views and concerns, a word of explanation may be in order. This textbook makes no assumption about the existence or absence of an objective reality. At the same time, human beings demonstrate an extensive and robust ability to establish agreements as to what’s “real.” This appears in regard to rocks and trees, as well as ghosts and gods, and even more elusive ideas such as loyalty and treason. Whether something like “prejudice” really exists, research into its nature can take place, because enough people agree that prejudice does exist, and researchers can use agreed-on techniques of inquiry to study it.
Another social science paradigm, critical realism, suggests that we define “reality” as that which can be seen to have an effect. Since prejudice clearly has an observable effect in our lives, it must be judged “real” in terms of this point of view. This paradigm fits together interestingly with the statement attributed to early American sociologist, W. I. Thomas: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."
**[DEF BOX: critical realism: a paradigm that holds things are real in they produce effects ]**
This book will not require or even encourage you to choose among positivism, postmodernism, or any of the other paradigms discussed in this chapter. In fact, I invite you to look for value in any and all as you seek to understand the world that may or may not exist around you.
Similarly, as social researchers, we are not forced to align ourselves entirely with either of these approaches. Instead, we can treat them as two distinct arrows in our quiver. Each approach compensates for the weaknesses of the other by suggesting complementary perspectives that can produce useful lines of inquiry.
For example, the renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking has elegantly described the appealing simplicity of the positivistic model but tempers his remarks with a recognition of the way science is practiced.
According to this way of thinking, a scienti?c theory is a mathematical model that describes and codi?es the observations we make. A good theory will describe a large range of phenomena on the basis of a few simple postulates and will make de?nite predictions that can be tested. If the predictions agree with the observations, the theory survives that test, though it can never be proved to be correct. On the other hand, if the observations disagree with the predictions, one has to discard or modify the theory. (At least, that is what is supposed to happen. In practice, people often question the accuracy of the observations and the reliability and moral character of those making the observations.)
(2001: 31)
In summary, a rich variety of theoretical paradigms can be brought to bear on the study of social life. With each of these fundamental frames of reference, useful theories can be constructed. We turn now to some of the issues involved in theory construction, which are of interest and use to all social researchers, from positivists to postmodernists—and all those in between.
A more sophisticated positivism would assert that we can rationally understand and predict even nonrational behavior. An example is the famous Asch experiment (Asch 1958). In this experiment, a group of subjects is presented with a set of lines on a screen and asked to identify the two lines that are equal in length.
Imagine yourself a subject in such an experiment. You are sitting in the front row of a classroom in a group of six subjects. A set of lines is projected on the wall in front of you (see Figure 2-1). The experimenter asks each of you, one at a time, to identify the line to the right (A, B, or C) that matches the length of line X. The correct answer (B) is pretty obvious to you. To your surprise, however, you ?nd that all the other subjects agree on a different answer!
[Insert figure 2-1 Here]
The experimenter announces that all but one of the group has gotten the correct answer. Because you are the only one who chose B, this amounts to saying that you’ve gotten it wrong. Then a new set of lines is presented, and you have the same experience. What seems to be the obviously correct answer is said by everyone else to be wrong.
As it turns out, of course, you are the only real subject in this experiment—all the others are working with the experimenter. The purpose of the experiment is to see whether you will be swayed by public pressure to go along with the incorrect answer. In his initial experiments, all of which involved young men, Asch found that a little over one-third of his subjects did just that.
Choosing an obviously wrong answer in a simple experiment is an example of nonrational behavior. But as Asch went on to show, experimenters can examine the circumstances that lead more or fewer subjects to go along with the incorrect answer. For example, in subsequent studies, Asch varied the size of one group and the number of “dissenters” who chose the “wrong” (that is, the correct) answer. Thus, it is possible to study nonrational behavior rationally and scienti?cally.
More radically, we can question whether social life abides by rational principles at all. In the physical sciences, developments such as chaos theory, fuzzy logic, and complexity have suggested that we may need to rethink fundamentally the orderliness of events in the physical world. Certainly the social world might be no tidier than the world of physics.
The contemporary challenge to positivism, however, goes beyond the question of whether people behave rationally. In part, the criticism of positivism challenges the idea that scientists can be as objective as the positivistic ideal assumes. Most scientists would agree that personal feelings can and do in?uence the problems scientists choose to study, what they choose to observe, and the conclusions they draw from their observations.
There is an even more radical critique of the ideal of objectivity. As we glimpsed in the discussions of feminism and ethnomethodology, some contemporary researchers suggest that subjectivity might actually be preferable in some situations. Let’s take a moment to return to the dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity.
To begin, all our experiences are inescapably subjective. There is no way out. We can see only through our own eyes, and anything peculiar to our eyes will shape what we see. We can hear things only the way our particular ears and brain transmit and interpret sound waves. You and I, to some extent, hear and see different realities. And both of us experience quite different physical “realities” than, say, do bats. In what to us is total darkness, a bat “sees” things such as ?ying insects by emitting a sound we humans can’t hear. The re?ection of the bat’s sound creates a “sound picture” precise enough for the bat to home in on the moving insect and snatch it up in its teeth. In a similar vein, scientists on the planet Xandu might develop theories of the physical world based on a sensory apparatus that we humans can’t even imagine. Maybe they see X-rays or hear colors.
Despite the inescapable subjectivity of our experience, we humans seem to be wired to seek an agreement on what is really real, what is objectively so. Objectivity is a conceptual attempt to get beyond our individual views. It is ultimately a matter of communication, as you and I attempt to ?nd a common ground in our subjective experiences. Whenever we succeed in our search, we say we are dealing with objective reality. This is the agreement reality discussed in Chapter 1.
To this point, perhaps the most signi?cant studies in the history of social science were conducted in the 1930s by a Turkish American social psychologist, Muzafer Sherif (1935), who slyly said he wanted to study “auto-kinetic effects.” To do this, he put small groups in totally darkened rooms, save for a single point of light in the center of the wall in front of the participants. Sherif explained that the light would soon begin to move about, and the subjects were to determine how far it was moving—a dif?cult task with nothing else visible as a gauge of length or distance.
Amazingly, each of the groups was able to agree as to the distance the point of light moved about. Oddly, however, the different groups of subjects arrived at very different conclusions. Strangest of all—as you may have guessed—the point of light had remained stationary. If you stare at a ?xed point of light long enough it will seem to move about (Sherif’s “auto-kinetic effect”). Notice, however, that each of the groups agreed on a speci?c delusion. The movement of the light was real to them, but it was a reality created out of nothing: a socially constructed reality.
Whereas our subjectivity is individual, then, our search for objectivity is social. This is true in all aspects of life, not just in science. While you and I prefer different foods, we must agree to some extent on what is ?t to eat and what is not, or else there could be no restaurants or grocery stores. The same argument could be made regarding every other form of consumption. Without agreement reality, there could be no movies or television, no sports.
Social scientists as well have found bene?ts in the concept of a socially agreed-on objective reality. As people seek to impose order on their experience of life, they ?nd it useful to pursue this goal as a collective venture. What are the causes and cures of prejudice? Working together, social researchers have uncovered some answers that hold up to intersubjective scrutiny. Whatever your subjective experience of things, for example, you can discover for yourself that as education increases, prejudice generally tends to decrease. Because each of us can discover this independently, we say that it is objectively true.
From the seventeenth century through the middle of the twentieth, however, the belief in an objective reality that was independent of individual perceptions predominated in science. For the most part, it was not simply held as a useful paradigm but as The Truth. The term positivism has generally represented the belief in a logically ordered, objective reality that we can come to know better and better through science. This is the view challenged today by postmodernists and others.
Some say that the ideal of objectivity conceals as much as it reveals. As we saw earlier, in years past much of what was regarded as objectivity in Western social science was actually an agreement primarily among white, middle-class European men. Equally real experiences common to women, to ethnic minorities, to non-Western cultures, or to the poor were not necessarily represented in that reality.
Thus, early anthropologists are now criticized for often making modern, Westernized “sense” out of the beliefs and practices of nonliterate tribes around the world, sometimes by portraying their subjects as superstitious savages. We often call orally transmitted beliefs about the distant past “creation myth,” whereas we speak of our own beliefs as “history.” Increasingly today, there is a demand to ?nd the native logic by which various peoples make sense out of life and to understand it on its own terms.
Ultimately, we’ll never be able to distinguish completely between an objective reality and our subjective experience. We can’t know whether our concepts correspond to an objective reality or are simply useful in allowing us to predict and control our environment. So desperate is our need to know what is really real, however, that both positivists and postmodernists are sometimes drawn into the belief that their own view is real and true. There is a dual irony in this. On the one hand, the positivist’s belief that science precisely mirrors the objective world must ultimately be based on faith; it cannot be proved by “objective” science, because that’s precisely what’s at issue. And the postmodernists, who say nothing is objectively so and everything is ultimately subjective, do at least feel that that is really the way things are.
Postmodernism is often portrayed as a denial of the possibility of social science. Because this book has already expressed sympathy for some postmodern views and concerns, a word of explanation may be in order. This textbook makes no assumption about the existence or absence of an objective reality. At the same time, human beings demonstrate an extensive and robust ability to establish agreements as to what’s “real.” This appears in regard to rocks and trees, as well as ghosts and gods, and even more elusive ideas such as loyalty and treason. Whether something like “prejudice” really exists, research into its nature can take place, because enough people agree that prejudice does exist, and researchers can use agreed-on techniques of inquiry to study it.
Another social science paradigm, critical realism, suggests that we define “reality” as that which can be seen to have an effect. Since prejudice clearly has an observable effect in our lives, it must be judged “real” in terms of this point of view. This paradigm fits together interestingly with the statement attributed to early American sociologist, W. I. Thomas: "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."
**[DEF BOX: critical realism: a paradigm that holds things are real in they produce effects ]**
This book will not require or even encourage you to choose among positivism, postmodernism, or any of the other paradigms discussed in this chapter. In fact, I invite you to look for value in any and all as you seek to understand the world that may or may not exist around you.
Similarly, as social researchers, we are not forced to align ourselves entirely with either of these approaches. Instead, we can treat them as two distinct arrows in our quiver. Each approach compensates for the weaknesses of the other by suggesting complementary perspectives that can produce useful lines of inquiry.
For example, the renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking has elegantly described the appealing simplicity of the positivistic model but tempers his remarks with a recognition of the way science is practiced.
According to this way of thinking, a scienti?c theory is a mathematical model that describes and codi?es the observations we make. A good theory will describe a large range of phenomena on the basis of a few simple postulates and will make de?nite predictions that can be tested. If the predictions agree with the observations, the theory survives that test, though it can never be proved to be correct. On the other hand, if the observations disagree with the predictions, one has to discard or modify the theory. (At least, that is what is supposed to happen. In practice, people often question the accuracy of the observations and the reliability and moral character of those making the observations.)
(2001: 31)
In summary, a rich variety of theoretical paradigms can be brought to bear on the study of social life. With each of these fundamental frames of reference, useful theories can be constructed. We turn now to some of the issues involved in theory construction, which are of interest and use to all social researchers, from positivists to postmodernists—and all those in between.

17. Asch Experiment (1958)
A group of subjects is present with a set of lines on a screen and asked to identify the two lines that are equal in length.
Others in the group identify A or C as the correct answer, while you know that B is the correct answer.
Just over 1/3…

18. Two Logical Systems, Revisited The Traditional Model of Science
Theory
Operationalization – Developing operational definitions, or specifying the exact operations involved in measuring a variable.
Operational Definition – The concrete and specific definition of something in terms of the operations by which observations are to be categorized.
Observation – Specifying the exact operations involved in measuring a variable.

23. Deductive Theory Construction Specify the topic.
Specify the range of phenomena your theory addresses.
Identify and specify your major concepts and variables.
Find out what is known about the relationships among those variables.
Reason logically from those propositions to the specific topic you are examining.

24. Inductive Theory Construction Observing aspects of social life and seeking to discover patterns that may point to relatively universal principles.
Grounded Theory
Field Research

25. The Links Between Theory and Research Deductive Model – research is used to test theories.
Inductive Model – theories are developed from analysis of data.

26. The Importance of Theory in the “Real World” “Just as pure sociology aims to answer the questions What, Why, and How, so applied sociology aims to answer the question What for. The former deals with facts, causes, and principles; the latter with the object, end, or purpose.” (Lester Ward, 1906)

27. Quick Quiz

28. 1. The three main elements of the traditional model of science are
theory, operationalization, and observation.
operationalization, hypothesis testing, and theory.
observation, experimentation, and operationalization.
theory, observation, and hypothesis testing.
experimentation, hypothesis testing, and theory.

29. Answer: A.
The three main elements of the traditional mode of science are theory, operationalization, and observation.

30. 2. The paradigm that accounts for the impact of economic conditions on family structures is
symbolic interactionism.
structural functionalism.
positivism.
conflict.
exchange.

31. ANSWER: B.
The paradigm that accounts for the impact of economic conditions on family structures is structural functionalism.

32. 3. Which of the following is not a step in deductive theory construction?
Specify the topic.
Identify the major concepts and variables.
Identify propositions about the relationships among those variables.
Reason logically from those propositions to the specific topic one is examining.

33. ANSWER: B.
The following is not a step in deductive theory construction: identify the major concepts and variables.